Activists think the world will be uninhabitable for our children if the U.S. pulls out of the Paris Climate Accord. For example, via Vox
Quitting the Paris climate agreement would be a moral disgrace
President Trump is selling out our kids to give false hope to coal workers.
…
There is no employment upside to an “America First” retreat from global leadership on one of the few issues that can accurately be described as a potentially existential threat to humankind.
There is only the profound immorality of abdication — of gleefully passing a mounting problem on to our children, and on to the poor.
And one of it’s writers, David Roberts:
https://twitter.com/drvox/status/869997185018077184
Oh, the humanity!
But, the data (er, model) says, essentially “no difference”
Ouch.
Worse, even if we DID stay in it, (and all the other countries too) that .05°C savings is likely to get lost in the noise, since global temperature measurements are rounded. For example, in the USA, NOAA rounds the high and low temperature to the nearest whole degree Fahrenheit (0.55°C, a value over ten times greater than the .05°C savings Paris offers):
From NOAA’s REQUIREMENTS AND STANDARDS FOR NWS CLIMATE OBSERVATIONS:
The observer will round the entered data to whole units Fahrenheit by rounding up all positively signed values between T.5ºF and T.9ºF inclusive, (i.e., + 66.5ºF to 67ºF), and rounding down positively signed values between T.1ºF and T.4ºF, inclusive. For sub-zero temperatures, special attention is given to –T.5ºF values, to round it down. This method is known as ‘round half up asymmetric.’ For all negatively signed values between -T.5ºF and –T.1ºF, inclusive you round down (i.e., -3.5ºF to -3ºF) to nearest integer. For negatively signed values between –T.6ºF and –T.9ºF, inclusive, the data is rounded up (i.e., -10.6ºF to -11ºF) to higher absolute value.
Source: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/directives/sym/pd01013002curr.pdf
For Global temperature, GHCN data for example, NOAA rounds to the nearest tenth of a degree C, (0.1°C) TWICE the value of .05°C savings Paris offers.
Even the best case scenario out of the Paris Climate Accord will get lost in the data rounding.
Note: some minor edits to the title and formatting were made within 5 minutes of publication
Update 6/1/17 8:30AM: Steve Mosher informs me (via one of his usual drive by jerk comments that doesn’t deserve the light of day – he needs to learn netiquette on how to behave) that at Lucia’s site, there’s an essay on rounding and false precision.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/rounding-of-individual-measurements-in-an-average/
He suggests that the 0.05°C decrease in temperature would be detectable, and not lost in the noise. I’m doubtful of his claim, but it’s worth exploring – Anthony
Did Obama hate his country so much? Paris Agreement is wealth redistribution. The US is already cutting emissions for the past decade, while China keeps on steaming away. China gets to do as it pleases for 15 years and in return America has to accelerate the rate it is declining emissions? Added to that, China already emits twice what the US does.
Not just about China, but the idea what it is somehow find for countries to accelerate, while others decrease, doesn’t at all solve the problem you claim to want to solve. Even if I don’t believe in the problem, I could at least get behind a proposed solution for it. There isn’t too much shame in solving something that doesn’t need to be solved. Doing a mass juggling act and dressing it up as solving a problem is fraud.
Haha the globalists and their fake press are whining all over the news fit to burst today. Donald Tusk is tweeting/pleading Trump and the Guardian is in overdrive. It’s almost as if none of them know that the Paris accord won’t make any measurable difference to anything – other than the destruction of the Western economies of course.
Certainly a huge number of national leaders/governments, prominent politicians and scientists, leader of the UN etc etc have been reported as commenting critically on the possible pull out. Notably including China, the EU, Russia, UK…
Is that globalists and the fake press? Or everyone on the world stage outside the Trump administration?
Since when is expressing an opinion – factual? You can opine on anything you want. That does not make it factual. I am sure you could find an equal number of world leaders in 1939 that were denying the Holocaust. I guess that made them right since there were so many of them?
Seriously Griff, do you ever think before you post?
For those making negative remarks about Paris Hilton at the top: This is the worst kind of slut shaming, criticizing a woman for the pleasures she enjoys. This is almost always driven by jealousy. She is gorgeous, with Tolkien elf-like little bones. I’d love to be in her presence and especially mix chromosomes with her, making god-like Nordic children. Can we try to stay on topic here?
Regarding the discussion of rounding procedures in NOAA’s “REQUIREMENTS AND STANDARDS FOR NWS CLIMATE OBSERVATIONS”: This is known as the ’round half away from zero’ protocol, and is free of overall bias if the original numbers are positive or negative with equal probability. Unfortunately, more temperatures are positive numbers than negative numbers (especially when using Fahrenheit temperatures), so this procedure introduces a bias toward higher temperatures when the reading is midway between reportable values – a T.5°F ‘half-value’.
This was not a significant issue in the early days of floating-point math on computers, but it became an issue when large scale iterative modelling was performed where large numbers of calculations were involved and the round-off errors accumulated.
The bias could be removed by rounding these values up half the time, and down the other half of the time.
A better protocol is the ’round half to even’ protocol, which rounds T.5°F temperatures up or down equally depending on whether the number before the .5 is even or odd. The round half to even method treats positive and negative values symmetrically, and is therefore free of sign bias. More importantly, for reasonable distributions of y values, the average value of the rounded numbers is the same as that of the original numbers.
The IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic (IEEE 754) was developed over several years and promulgated in 1985 to address these problems.
It is inexcusable that NOAA and the NWS has not recognized the impact of these problems on its weather/climate modelling and failed to implement this 32-year old standard.
Paris Climate Pact –
“It is a treaty made by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” – With apologies to William Shakespeare.
Hi Anthony,
I’m no climate alarmist, but I have to say that Bjorn Lomborg’s graph is flat-out wrong. It’s been taken down by the Climate College at the University of Melbourne, Australia – the very team which developed the climate model that Lomborg relies on, in his analysis. Here’s a brief quote that says it all:
“Lomborg’s assertion that a Paris agreement would only reduce global temperatures by 0.17 degrees Celsius by 2100 is wrong. For multiple reasons. Here[‘s] just one. China’s INDC’s [Intended Nationally Determined Contributions] state[s] that CO2 emissions peak by 2030. Hence, in the worst case, they are staying flat thereafter. Lomborg’s analysis ignores that. Implicitly, this is the same as assuming that non-CO2 emissions in China will be more than 3 times higher compared to the no-climate policy scenarios from IPCC AR5. Wrong assumptions lead to wrong results.”
The authors go on to say that the IPCC AR5 scenarios “all assume that non-CO2 emissions in China will be around 2 to 4 GtCO2eq [equivalent Gigatonnes of CO2] throughout the century. Lomborg’s trajectory is more like 8 to 11 GtCO2eq.”
Their refutation of Lomborg is pretty devastating, and I would urge you to read it.
In my opinion, there’s only one good reason for not signing the Paris agreement: we don’t yet have the technology to stop global warming. Wind and solar won’t do the job:
http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/15.WINDTURBINE.pdf
It may be wrong in the eyes of others, but the argument basically boils down to “my assumptions about China are better than your assumptions about China” Who’s right? Only China knows, and they might not even fully know right now as their plans may change in the next 13 years before 2030.
The whole thing is a guesstimate.
Anthony: Everything about what happens after 2030 is a guesstimate (and before merely “intentions”). However, whoever prepared your Figure has INACCURATELY charactered the assumptions behind these guesstimates.
Figure S4 of Lomborg’s paper clearly says that “Paris extended for 70 years” will reduce warming by 0.7 K, not 0.17 K. Wrong is wrong. Read the paper.
The figure you show from Lomborg’s paper (0.17 K) is based on a 50% increase in Chinese emissions AFTER 2030, large increases in emission in the EU AFTER 2030, and (presumably) in the rest of the world AFTER 2030. Some of these may happen, but it is grossly misleading to say they are “Paris extended for 70 years”. There are more details in my earlier comment.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/1758-5899.12295/asset/supinfo/gpol12295-sup-0004-FigureS3.pdf?v=1&s=bd1072e835a8350848a97f2e06822677f87b82ba
Please correct this mistake.
I added this to the body of the story. Mr. Mosher would do well to learn and apply the phrase “you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar”
Steve Mosher informs me (via one of his usual drive by jerk comments that doesn’t deserve the light of day – he needs to learn netiquette on how to behave) that at Lucia’s site, there’s an essay on rounding and false precision.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/rounding-of-individual-measurements-in-an-average/
He suggests that the 0.05°C decrease in temperature would be detectable, and not lost in the noise. I’m doubtful of his claim, but it’s worth exploring – Anthony
Lomborg is wrong though…
https://www.forbes.com/sites/edfenergyexchange/2016/07/19/bjorn-lomborgs-climate-analysis-is-a-hot-mess/#25eaf9d02826
It’s a matter of opinion. None of this stuff is certain. It’s all assumption and projections on both sides.
Shouldn’t the article state the assumptions made for the projection shown? How is the reader to assess the veracity of the graph without knowing the underlying assumptions?
Actually, thinking about it a bit more, it’s a two step thing. First, does the graph accurately represent the result of the assumption, and more importantly, is the assumption likely to be correct?
This article has skipped the important bits and jumped straight to, well, here is a graph showing little difference, so therefore, headline: “In one graph, why the #ParisAgreement is useless”
Not very skeptical.
Instead of projections why not estimate the contribution USA has made so far, firstly if all warming was due to 100% CO2?
According to this link :- (I know it can be unreliable for anything controversial)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
USA CO2 emissions were in 2015 14.34% of the worlds total. (This would have varied over the years)
Global temperatures during the last 40 years have warmed 0.4c.
Hence USA’s contribution to warming 14.34% of 0.4c = 0.057c = 0.06c.
Therefore the trend of warming that USA has contributed has only been at 0.06c over the past 40 years. This value is actually very similar to the OP projection graph.
Decade trend 0.57c / 4 = 0.014c.
Over further 80 years = total of 0.11c
Remember this is for all warming detected caused by CO2, when it was impossible to occur when the paused occurred so long. The pause indicated that the natural climate ruled any underlying CO2 emissions and at the very most would be only 50% instead.
50% of warming contributed by USA = 0.055c until 2100.
NOTE – This value is almost the same by projections.
Where does the graph in the article come from? I do not see it at the listed source: Bjorn Lomborg -Impact of Current Climate Proposals DOI: 10.1111/1758-5899.12295
Figure 11 of Lomborg’s paper, but someone who created a Powerpoint using this Figure added the header and false information stating that the green line was Paris extended for 70 years. It is not. It assumes dramatic increases in Chinese and European CO2 emissions after 2030 – a return to business as usual everywhere except the US. “Paris extended for 70 years” can be found in the supplementary material Figure S4. Nowhere does the text mention Figure S4 or discuss its implications. One possibility is that a reviewer asked for a “Paris extended for 70 years” scenario and Lomborg added one without changing the text of the paper. Clearly he doesn’t want readers to know that if Paris objectives were reached and then continued through 2010, warming would be reduced from 4.7 to 4.0 degC.
Frank
You are assuming for some reason that China and India and Brazil and Indonesia and the rest of developing nations of the world are going to mindlessly kill their people and beggar their nations in dream of some “climate change control” benefits that only enrich European and New York bankers and their socialist-communist politician sponsors? Why should ANY nation follow this deadly treaty?
Here is a link to the actual paper:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-5899.12295/full
It is under a creative commons license, so I have no idea why the article doesn’t include a link to the paper it is talking about.
I also don’t know why the article doesn’t explain the circumstances that would have to occur for the result to be that shown on the graph. Apparently we don’t need to know that.
Anthony says “It’s all assumption and projections on both sides.”, but he hasn’t updated the article to explain what these assumptions might be, or provide a link to the paper.
Apparently all you need to know is that this one graph shows why the #ParisAgreement is useless…
philip – you link _is_ to
the entire paper.
Science is supposed to be about induction, reasoning from observation, experimentation, etc. to conclusions. Debate is supposed to be about whether the methodology is applied correctly. If it is, then the conclusions are true. If not, conclusions are rejected.
Leftists have tried to make science deductive, as in, conclusion oriented. Championed by Stalin’s pet scientist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, debate is centered on whether proposed conclusions are acceptable to a specific ideological outlook. If politically correct, conclusions are accepted. If not, then conclusions are rejected and their proponents silenced — permanently.
In the former Soviet Union, dissenting scientists were sent to the Gulag. In the U.S., leftists have to settle for character assassination and/or legal harassment.
Tell us how to do an experiment in climate science.
Where is your control Earth?
No link to Lomborg. How did he arrive at the .05 percent figure? Is that what the Treaty proponents say, or is it Lomborg’s independent analysis?
link to lomberg:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-5899.12295/full
So what if it is lost in the noise or not? It’s meaningless either way. The US should continue to focus on energy efficiency (e.g. LED bulbs) and technology advancements. Everything else is “noise”.
You’re showing the wrong graph.
Paris agreement isn’t about reducing carbon, or reducing warming.
It’s about wealth redistribution and reducing US GDP. You need a graph showing how the projected wealth extracted from the US changes, and GDP changes in order to show how the US dropping out affects the actual goal of the agreement vice the justification for it.
“But, the data (er, model) says,”
No, the data from Bjorn Lomborg says, this data is not from the Paris agreement itself.
And even if he is right, both you and him are ignoring the fact that we have to start somewhere to prevent global warming and climate chaos. The Paris agreement was the first climate action agreement all nations agreed to, and it got all nations to agree to picking the lowest hanging fruit to fight carbon emissions. Any other agreement that followed would simply take it further, and would have to cover these “tiny changes” you’re pointing out here anyway.
This might have value had the premises been not predicated upon two pieces of erroneously extrapolated data from Facts4COP21’s MAGICC climate model (http://climate-energy-college.org/facts4cop21).